Why Doesn't the World Stop When We Lose Someone We Love?

It's a Saturday morning and it's quiet in my house. My husband has taken our 3 year-old to swim lessons and my 1 year-old is pretending to nap upstairs. Snow is falling outside and there is something particularly quiet about snow falling. Like it knows it's so beautiful that it wants to sneak up on you so that when you look outside, you are wonderstruck.
Life appears to be normal. But the thing is, it's not. Earlier this week, my beautiful cousin took her own life. After struggling with addiction and more, she made a choice that has left us all in pieces. We break for her that we could not have done more. We break for her parents who are dealing with the unfathomable: the loss of a child. We break for her brothers and sister, her friends and for all those grappling with the same kind of pain she must have felt.
What strikes me this Saturday morning is that the world is continuing on. That even though this horrific thing has happened - this abrupt ending - it's business as usual for Mother Nature and all her friends. Why doesn't the world stop when we lose someone we love? Our lived experience in times like these is that everything halts: the dirty dishes remain in the sink, the work gets put on hold, the trips cut short. But that's just one tiny little corner of one tiny little block of this very big world. The truth is, everything continues on. And it feels cruel.
Jonathan Larson, in his musical Rent, writes about this in the song, "Without You":

Without you

The ground thaws

The rain falls

The grass grows

Without you

The seeds root

The flowers bloom

The children play

The stars gleam

The poets dream

The eagles fly

Without you

The earth turns

The sun burns

But I die without you

When something as horrible as this happens, it feels like the world should stop. Because a beautiful soul was lost and a family wounded beyond repair. Why doesn't the world around us recognize this? Why doesn't it feel the loss as its own and, at the very least, pause in acknowledgement.

Upstairs, my daughter is beginning to wake (did she even sleep?). She lets me know this by jumping in her crib and squealing for joy. She'll need to be changed and fed. And soon, my toddler will return home from swim with lots of stories to tell. And so I will change and feed, greet and listen. Because the world keeps going on without you. And I'm so sorry and so sad it's going on without you, Marigene. It was better with you in it. We love you and we miss you. And we wish there was something we could have done to have kept you here with us. 

The snow continues to fall and the roads are getting messy. The plows will come soon and my husband will need to shovel the driveway. I'll be inside, hoping and praying that returning to the goings on of this world will eventually heal us. I'm certain some answers lie in my daughters, whose goings ons are the work of my day. For that I am grateful.

An Open Heart

I went to the dentist today to get a filling (which, by the way, is the WORST). My dentist lets us listen to music to drown out the drilling and also wear sunglasses so the exam light doesn't blind us. She's quite thoughtful, really. I put on a playlist I had made for a yoga intensive and on that playlist was "Fight Song" by Rachel Platten. It's a powerful song she wrote about taking back her life and getting back to who she is, amidst a lot of hardship. So, I'm sitting in the dentist chair, mouth pried open with some kind of torture device, getting my teeth drilled by an actual torture device, completely numb and drooling, trying not to audibly sob while I think about my powerful friend who absolutely embodies this song right now. Thank goodness for the sunglasses. I mean, what is WRONG with me? Who gets choked up in the dentist's chair?

A good friend recently gave me a children's Christmas book by Nancy Tillman. We have a number of her books but not The Spirit of Christmas so I was thrilled to receive it. But let me tell you about Nancy Tillman: lady makes me UGLY CRY. Like, openly weep. Oh, that's so sweet, you say. Yeah, not when it freaks out your children who haven't quite figured out what a sentimental sap you are and instead are wondering Did you get an owie, Mama?

From Tillman's My Love Will Find You

I was not always this way!

While my talent for choking up is genetic, I wasn't always so susceptible (a.k.a. I didn't always need sunglasses in the dentist's chair). I don't particularly enjoy wearing my heart on my sleeve but two things have happened to me in my life that have ripped my heart wide and opened the floodgates: I had my heart broken and then I had children.

Having someone you love hurt you is devastating. Whether they break-up with you, leave you or pass away, it is debilitating. The heart, while a muscle, breaks like a bone. It can shatter into a million pieces. To say this hurts is an understatement. But out of this shattered matter fuses a heart stronger than the one before.

The second thing, having children, made my heart burst. The levies that surrounded my heart gave way. There was not a powerful enough border to contain what transpired (and transpires) in my heart due to these little monsters running around my house. The love was (and is) overwhelming. Yet just like my heartbreak from years prior left me disassembled, so this bursting left me in pieces. Pieces that were glued together in a makeshift way, as if the cause of the burst (my children) were doing the repair themselves.



One could argue that a reassembled heart is weaker and more vulnerable to re-breaking. I suppose that's true. At least, it's true if we accept society's definition of strength as having a hard, unbreakable shell. I'm thinking I reject that definition and I'll tell you why.

A heart with cracks can let more OUT, too. A heart that knows it's been broken and survived has the ability to be braver because it knows where it's been. It has been to the depths and lived to tell the tale. All the seams present from the repairs are not scars but rather passageways through which love can pass.

I think of a piece of ceramic pottery that has been repeatedly repaired and forged back together after years of wear and tear. Against the odds, it maintains its structure but it also leaks. This is my heart. It is a leaky, glued together albeit strong, piece of pottery. It allows light and love in more easily than it used to, and releases them with more generosity.

It is precisely in the leaking (in the gaps) that my strength lies.

Five years ago, my dad had a quintuple bypass. The day he had surgery, I was far away in San Francisco where I lived at the time. Picturing him lying on an operating table with his chest open - his heart open - scared me tremendously. My sentimental, generous, hard-working, loving and amazing father was in the most vulnerable position ever: lying on a table with his heart completely open. I was so worried that he would never be the same.

A lot of things have changed since my dad had surgery. For one, he now has six grandchildren for whom his love flows out of his leaky heart like a river. Thankfully he is in good health now and ready and willing to audibly sob at any feel-good movie or children's book (he can't get through a Tillman, either). His heart has been reassembled stronger than ever, thanks to its scars and cracks. I'd argue that his heart and capacity to love is stronger now than it has ever been. He knows where he's been and what he's survived and rather than being unwilling to re-open that scarred heart of his, his commitment to love through the cracks is unyielding.